AI with a Human Touch

Retail markets across the globe are changing exponentially and are becoming increasingly challenging.

Sep 13, 2017, 10.47 AM IST

Retail markets across the globe are changing exponentially and are becoming increasingly challenging.

The ‘survival of the fittest’ norm now applies even to the biggest names in the retailspace. With economic and political landscapes constantly changing and becoming notoriously unpredictable, retailers are forced to come up with innovative ideas and products to stay relevant in their operating markets, with customers getting increasingly demanding and wanting more for less.

With retailers looking to build next-generation e-commerce platforms and apps to align their offerings to the market expectations, it is critical that they accelerate their efforts to build capability and efficiency levels across key functions in order to transform their businesses and get that competitive edge.

Proficient people in an organisation are more likely to become the differentiating factor in delivering the value proposition to its customers by going the extra mile for them. This is, however, easier said than done. Finding candidates with the right skill set in a market like India, known for its low levels of skills, is particularly difficult. Such talent is in high demand but in short supply and sadly, those who seem to fit the bill are very often passive job seekers.

With high levels of attrition recorded across key industries like IT and retail, traditional recruitment techniques no longer achieve the desired results, not to mention the cumbersome and lengthy administrative processes involved. Recruiters must now innovate and adapt new ways of reaching out to potential candidates, even if it means adoption of technologies such as automation and artificial intelligence (AI). Therefore, it is imperative for the new-age recruiter to be equipped or trained to operate new sourcing tools and sourcing methods.

AI tools can be used to crawl on social and technical sites like GitHub, Stack Overflow, Facebook, Twitter to source candidates with the ideal skill sets. It also aggregates the candidate’s digital footprint on a single page and segregates candidates based on their interests. Such advanced tools help recruiters to not only find the right talent but also increase recruiter productivity through reduced hiring cycles and improved quality of hiring.

Additionally, AI supported sourcing is also proven to be effective when it comes to predictive modeling.

Using AI, recruiters can study the success pattern, analyse historical data and learn candidate preferences over a period and predict right profile matches. These predictions help to optimize the sourcing funnel, improve candidate conversion ratios, and hire the right talent. Without AI support, recruiters would find it very time consuming and difficult to meet this objective.

Assessment of key skills such as programming and communication have now been made possible using AI as a predictive tool in many downstream processes of recruitment as well, predominantly during assessment and interview rounds. This also helps eliminate ineffective assessments and replaces it with improved and more accurate predictive assessments that are derived from data gathered over time.

Clearly, the adoption of AI and other tools to identify potential talent isinevitable and organizations whose recruitment teams incorporate them sooner are more likely to wield an advantage over others who don’t.

Having said that, hiring quality talent is not only about sourcing and assessing their skills. It is also about the person, their personality, the cultural fit, and the delicate matter of salary negotiation. These stages of recruitment still require human validation and intervention to zero in on candidates, considering humans alone can only understand the emotional quotient of other fellow humans.

Therefore, to survive and thrive in the cut-throat world of retail, organisations will need to constantly improve their overall operational efficiencies through a strategic yet balanced mix of human interface and technology prowess, particularly when it comes to hiring the best candidates. After all, every organization is only as good as their best employees.

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